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Your Excellencies, Honorable Ministers, distinguished officials, members of the Bar, and guests.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to participate in PALU’s annual conference, this year focusing on the eradication of corruption and illicit financial flows and the role of lawyers and lawyers associations. These issues have moved into the forefront of Africa’s agenda in recent years and will continue to shape thinking about maximizing domestic resources for development in the coming years.

Thank you. I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in CAPP Foundation’s 2017 conference. This morning we are focusing our attention on human smuggling and economic crime, as Lord Skidelsky will focus our attention this afternoon on incentivizing solidarity and civic virtue.

Can we curtail global crime while we welcome tax evasion? In my opinion the answer to this question is a resounding “NO.” But this is what we are trying to do.

Let us be very honest with ourselves. We in the West have over the past 4 or 5 decades built a global shadow financial system designed to move tax evading and tax avoiding money across borders. I think by now all of us are familiar with its elements – tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, disguised corporations, anonymous trust accounts, fake foundations, money laundering techniques, trade misinvoicing is the most commonly used component of this structure, and then there are holes left in the laws of our western countries that facilitate the movement of money through this shadow financial system and ultimately into our own economies.

Heather Lowe, GFI’s legal counsel and director of government affairs, testified at a U.S. Department of Labor hearing in Washington on January 15, 2015, urging the department to maintain a ban on Credit Suisse’s ability to engage in high-risk transactions with the pension fund money that they manage following their November 2014 criminal conviction for aiding in tax evasion and the Swiss bank’s long history of systemic compliance failures at the institution and its affiliates.

Raymond Baker, the President of Global Financial Integrity, addresses the issue of illicit financial flows while speaking at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada at “Beyond 2015: Towards a New Consensus on Global Poverty,” a conference marking the launch of the Canadian chapter of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).